Using Sentinel-2 Imagery to Measure Spatiotemporal Changes and Recovery across Three Adjacent Grasslands with Different Fire Histories

Author:

Taylor Annalise1ORCID,Dronova Iryna12ORCID,Sigona Alexii1,Kelly Maggi13ORCID

Affiliation:

1. Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

2. Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

3. Informatics and GIS Statewide Program, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA

Abstract

As a result of the advocacy of Indigenous communities and increasing evidence of the ecological importance of fire, California has invested in the restoration of intentional burning (the practice of deliberately lighting low-severity fires) in an effort to reduce the occurrence and severity of wildfires. Recognizing the growing need to monitor the impacts of these smaller, low-severity fires, we leveraged Sentinel-2 imagery to reveal important inter- and intra-annual variation in grasslands before and after fires. Specifically, we explored three methodological approaches: (1) the complete time series of the normalized burn ratio (NBR), (2) annual summary metrics (mean, fifth percentile, and amplitude of NBR), and (3) maps depicting spatial patterns in these annual NBR metrics before and after fire. We also used a classification of pre-fire vegetation to stratify these analyses by three dominant vegetation cover types (grasses, shrubs, and trees). We applied these methods to a unique study area in which three adjacent grasslands had diverging fire histories and showed how grassland recovery from a low-severity intentional burn and a high-severity wildfire differed both from each other and from a reference site with no recent fire. On the low-severity intentional burn site, our results showed that the annual NBR metrics recovered to pre-fire values within one year, and that regular intentional burning on the site was promoting greater annual growth of both grass and shrub species, even in the third growing season following a burn. In the case of the high-severity wildfire, our metrics indicated that this grassland had not returned to its pre-fire phenological signals in at least three years after the fire, indicating that it may be undergoing a longer recovery or an ecological shift. These proposed methods address a growing need to study the effects of small, intentional burns in low-biomass ecosystems such as grasslands, which are an essential part of mitigating wildfires.

Funder

University of California Graduate Division Fellowship

UC Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa Graduate Fellowship

Publisher

MDPI AG

Reference48 articles.

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3. Putting Fire on the Land: The Indigenous People Spoke the Language of Ecology, and Understood the Connectedness and Relationship Between Land, Water, and Fire;Goode;J. Calif. Great Basin Anthropol.,2022

4. Returning Fire to the Land: Celebrating Traditional Knowledge and Fire;Lake;J. For.,2017

5. The Importance of Indigenous Cultural Burning in Forested Regions of the Pacific West, USA;Long;For. Ecol. Manag.,2021

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